Rohit K Dasgupta: “This book needed to be written with feminist and queer care”
Dasgupta talks about the collaborative choices that shaped the volume, the history of queer resistance in the UK, and why telling these stories matter
Each of the authors of this book comes from a distinct background. How did it all come together?
So, the project was conceived in 2020. Initially, it was a very different project — looking at South Asian queer migration to the UK. I met Churnjeet Mahn, born and brought up in Glasgow, through mutual friends.
During lockdown, with archives closed, we began reconceiving the project: what if we looked inward, at the South Asian queer diaspora in the UK? We started off with an article on cultural activism for the (now discontinued) radical feminist magazine gal-dem, which drew huge interest. We thought, why not refocus on the UK aspect?
We asked Ritu, a DJ and co-founder of Shakti, to help us with some of the interviews, and that’s how the collaboration started.
Churnjeet and I did most of the writing, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Ritu’s empirical work: getting access to people, conducting the interviews.
The story we’re telling is messy. There were tensions and disjunctures within the South Asian queer community around class, religion, nationality. For us, it was important to have that kind of conduit — Ritu — to reach people.
I was recently reading Whistling in the Dark edited by R Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma, where some interviews were conducted under precarious conditions — the editors had to be discreet or pretend to be someone else just to get access. I presume you faced similar challenges? Were there cases when you wanted to keep a story, but someone didn’t want it included?
Ethics is really important when someone shares their story, knowing it might become part of a book. When our book came out, not everyone in the community was happy because it’s hard to air your dirty laundry. We couldn’t change anything because it was already in print. Still, it was important that it wasn’t some sanitised tale, because that’s not the truth.
Even after the book was copy edited, we sent it to everyone included, even if anonymous, which was a lot of people. At least one person, despite being anonymized, said, “I need to take my story out.” They were worried about how it was coming across and about being identified. Some of these events happened 50 years ago, and yet it was very raw for them.
We respected it, and the publishers were understanding. This is a book that needed to be written, but it also had to be done with feminist and queer care.
The book references many books and movies, especially in chapter four. How do you see cultural production and activist history interplaying?
This goes back to 1980s Britain and Ken Livingstone, the left-wing leader of the Greater London Council. He was funding a lot of anti-racist and queer work. Local authorities, especially Labour-run ones like Lambeth and Haringey, also funded this work. Much of it went to people working in culture, which became the means through which change was being enacted.
Much of this queer South Asian work was rooted in an anti-racist ethos. Being anti-racist was integral to their activism.
This was all in the backdrop of Section 28, Thatcher’s very famous law that made it illegal for local authorities to “promote” any relationship or family structure that wasn’t heterosexual. Because of the national government’s position, local authorities had to take up that mantle.
Today, we have multiple realities coexisting, especially because of social media, but at the same time, there’s a rise of authoritarianism and majoritarianism across the globe, with governments pushing linear narratives. How do you see these contrasting forces playing out in your life and work?
That’s a really good question because there’s so much resonance between the book and what’s happening now.
The 1980s and 1990s were a time of political Blackness. Many Asian, South Asian, and queer activists were working under this umbrella because they realised there was more that united them than divided them. Fighting fascism or racism, it didn’t matter whether you were African, Caribbean, or Asian — you were all up against the same things.
That sense of unity was important. But I don’t mean to romanticize political Blackness either. Within that umbrella, there were tensions and differences. For a South Asian person, while facing one form of ostracization or discrimination, you also had certain privileges. Your experience was different from someone from an African or Muslim background.
Which is why, today, I think the community is more atomized. In London, we have the Gay India Network, Imaan, the LGBT Muslim network, and Sarbat, working with queer Sikhs. I understand the reasoning behind that. Your needs and approaches are often specific, and we tell that story too. But today, with so much transphobia and effort to divide communities based on religion, class, ethnicity, there’s something to be said for looking back.
One example in the book is Lespop — self-help posters in Punjabi by Punjabi lesbians, with information on what to do during a police or immigration raid. Queer or not, if you were brown, you faced the same power structures. There was a greater sense of unity.
All of these histories stem from colonial contact. The reason you have large South Asian communities in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, or other East African countries is indentured labour. Similarly, when Kenyan and Ugandan Asians were expelled, some South Asians moved to Canada after failing to get asylum in the UK. The Ismaili community, for example, moved to Canada because the Canadian government was close to Aga Khan, and that led to large-scale migration.
We use the term queer brown Atlantic to suggest that even into the early 2000s, there was a lot more exchange happening among queer diasporas across these geographies.
For example, the newsletter Shakti Khabar was circulated in India and the US. Trikone, a San Francisco- and New York-based organisation, also had a widely circulated magazine. There was more transnational movement and exchange then than today.
Of course, you could see that positively. Perhaps the community has grown so much that it doesn’t need to rely on those older models. But you could also see it as a sign of fragmentation.
Do you think Britain’s queer communities of colour have to offer anything to global queer scholarship and diasporic conversations?
I’d find it hard to say that Britain has something to teach — it doesn’t, really. But South Asian organizing in Britain can offer insight into how diverse communities come together and the tensions that emerge.
An Instagram post I saw recently said, “There is no queer community in India. There are only different queer groups organizing.” I think that’s true.
For example, one part of the queer community has been fighting for same-sex marriage, very different from another section fighting for horizontal reservations for trans people. You won’t always see them organizing together because their concerns come from vastly different class, caste, religious, and regional backgrounds.
That kind of atomization won’t lead to meaningful progressive change unless people come together. Nothing’s going to shift otherwise. There’s also something very specific about the South Asian story in the UK, and it’s different from the South Asian diaspora in the US.
A lot of organizing in the US came from first-generation South Asians who came with class and caste privilege, working in Silicon Valley. In Britain, many Asians who moved were working-class, often second-generation. So, it’s a completely different class dynamic.
There’s no one-size-fits-all model, but there are teachable moments: insights into the tensions of organizing, pitfalls of solidarity, complexities of coalition-building.
A good example is Shivananda Khan, co-founder of Shakti, who later founded the Naz Project London, and then the Naz Foundation International in India, which fought Section 377. So, there was movement, continuity, but also, as always, complexity.
The book often talks about unity and solidarity. In your life, where do you get your sense of unity and solidarity?
I get my sense of unity and solidarity from my comrades. I come with certain privileges, but the friends and co-organizers I’ve chosen have always been intersectional.
It’s never been about single-issue politics; you can’t talk about queer rights without the broader framework of anti-racist movements, immigration rights, asylum rights, and pro-migrant policies. Similarly, with social security, benefits, housing, it all has to come together.
There’s no other way to fight for progressive politics. Single-issue organizing has never worked, and never will. We’ve seen that in India and the UK.
My main political fight is for universal education and universal healthcare. I’m glad that in the UK, we have the National Health Service, where it doesn’t matter who you are, you can see a doctor, get medicine or surgery without paying.
It’s very different from the US or India, where you can go bankrupt. My grandmother’s kidneys failed, and we had to sell our house to pay for her treatment.
I take those experiences into my politics and as the local councillor of Newham, around 70% non-white and one of the most deprived boroughs in one of the richest cities. Every day, I see people struggling to put food on the table. That reality is constant. Those people are my comrades, with whom I organize.
There’s much more representation in the diaspora now compared to the 1970s and ’80s, the period you’re writing about. But what challenges from that time still persist, and what new dynamics have emerged?
The big challenge is the withdrawal of public funding. A lot of work that used to get funded simply doesn’t anymore, and that’s a huge issue. Austerity Britain has made things very difficult. But some organizations still do amazing work, like the Naz Project London, which works with South Asian, Latino, African Caribbean, HIV-positive communities.
There are huge challenges in funding, but also in this authoritarian turn. The rise of the so-called “gender critical” movement has brought intense transphobia. Much of the West clings to a binary logic of science, not realising that science is itself a deeply subjective field.
When people say, “There are only two genders scientifically,” they’re wrong. There’s much to be learned from India and its trans activists, too.
In this increasingly atomized, social media–driven world, do you feel that the protest culture has diminished? Especially given how social media often fragments rather than unites?
My PhD was on digital queer cultures in India, and I started with an optimistic view of what digital culture could do — creating a public sphere, offering spaces for organizing, community-building, romantic intimacies, and more.
Over time, those spaces have been taken over by forces making them unsafe, particularly for people from certain religious or class backgrounds. So, I’ve had to rethink my earlier optimism. The very platforms that allowed people to bypass legacy media and traditional organizing have been co-opted by regressive forces.
That said, Paolo Gerbaudo’s term — the choreography of assembly — in his book Tweets and the Streets describes how social media choreographs action that then gets realized on the ground.
I still believe there’s potential in social media for bringing people together, knowledge production, and information activism, leading to real, grounded change.
The book features many first-generation South Asian voices, and you’ve said you’re first-generation too. Could you share your journey in understanding your identity?
I moved to Britain 15 years ago. At meetings of Dost, a South Asian men’s group under Naz, I was struck by conversations about coming out — things we’d already moved past in India. But the truth is, for many second- or third-generation Asians, these issues remain difficult. The communities they live in and the conversations around queerness are still complex. That made me realize legislative change alone is not enough.
Homosexuality was decriminalized long ago in the UK. Section 28 was repealed under Labour. Same-sex marriage and civil partnerships were legalized years ago. But that hasn’t necessarily meant the lives of South Asian queers have improved.
Legal protections matter, but without societal and attitudinal change, there’s no meaningful change. That’s why it’s important to keep doing work on the ground.
Who’s talking about social welfare for queer people, or discrimination in housing or health care? Those conversations need to happen alongside legal reforms.
Amritesh Mukherjee is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: aroomofwords
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